With First Nations chiefs and activists promising demonstrations across the country Wednesday, the National Post’s Kathryn Blaze Carlson spoke with Ontario Provincial Police Commissioner Chris Lewis to find out how the force is preparing. Earlier this month, the OPP came under fire from a judge frustrated that police failed to enforce his court injunction to stop a railway blockade. Judge David Brown had made a distinction between the 2006 blockade in Caledonia, where protesters had a specific land claim and were therefore subject to a more “nuanced” interpretation of the law, and the recent blockades in Sarnia and Tyendinaga, where he ordered injunctions because they constituted political opposition to legislation. In light of this legal murkiness, Commissioner Lewis defends his force’s inaction and takes a look at what’s to come:

Q: How are you preparing for Wednesday? What’s on your radar?
A: We’re in a bit of a heightened state of awareness in terms of knowing where some of the publicly communicated protests will be. We have plans to monitor and deal with those. Our main operation is still to keep the peace and protect the public — and not have a role to play in resolving the underlying issues behind these protests, which of course are embedded right back to the 1700s. We’re not going to solve that. Our folks are dealing with the organizers of protests that we know are going to occur, to talk about some of the parameters and work out some of the details.

Q: You know, then, about the protest planned for along Hwy. 401, near Windsor, and the one along the Ambassador Bridge?
A: We know about the one on the Ambassador Bridge. I haven’t [heard about the one on Hwy. 401]. Mind you, this is a big force and I get told a lot of things in a day. The Ambassador Bridge is Windsor police’s area, so we’ll have a traffic role in terms of the resulting back-up in traffic.

Q: Are you expecting a total blockade of the bridge, or just one lane? One chief told me he thought the protest would take over just one lane, or no lanes at all, in fact.
A: That’s Windsor police’s issue. If the traffic backs up onto the freeway and expressway that leads to the bridge, then that’s ours. The bridge itself and the turf around there is not ours. But we work closely with [Windsor police], and our commanders down there will assist if requested.

Q: The grand chief said the Hwy. 401 blockade on Wednesday is just a taste of what could happen come springtime. He threatened to shut down the highway for days on end and cause “chaos.” What do you do say to that?
A: It would be [chaos]. There would be a point where we’d have to take action. How we do it and when do it is critical to us in terms of trying to do it as safely as possible.

Q: Given the recent court decisions, the application of the law seems kind of murky when it comes to First Nations protests. Police are left to decide whether to intervene, so at what point does an officer say, ‘OK, we have to jump in now’?
A: If it’s not peaceful. If there are threats of violence or violence occurs, we have a duty to respond. But just like if the teachers block a road tomorrow as part of the strike, we’re not going to march in and start arresting all the teachers. We’re going to try to talk through a de-escalation of any tension and come up with some parameters. We keep getting accused by people saying, ‘That’s just the approach you take with First Nations people.’ But that’s just not true. It’s the way you deal with strikes. There may be a time when enough is enough and we have to take action, whether that’s through a court injunction or not.

For example, when it came to the rail line outside Tyendinaga a couple weeks ago, we got [the injunction] from the sherriff at 10:30 at night. By midnight, that rail line was open. If we were to march in there and injure people — or God forbid, worse, like we saw in Ipperwash — it would be for what? It’s going to open in an hour-and-a-half anyway. We didn’t go into Ipperwash guns a-blazing, but guns were a-blazing before it was over. We just don’t want to be in that position if we can avoid it, but if can’t, we can’t. We’ll deal with it because that’s our job. But our job is not to just march in willy-nilly and start arresting everybody the moment a road is blocked.